A Son of the Circus by John. Irving

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from John Irving's In One Person.

A Hindi film star . . . an American missionary . . . twins separated at birth . . . a dwarf chauffeur . . . a serial killer . . . all are on a collision course. In the tradition of A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving's characters transcend nationality. They are misfits--coming from everywhere, belonging nowhere. Set almost entirely in India, this is John Irving's most ambitious novel and a major publishing event.

John Irving published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and an Academy Award.

Unrated Critic Reviews for A Son of the Circus

Kirkus Reviews

Part murder mystery, part travelogue, part meditation on faith, sexual personae, and prejudice, the story follows Dr. Daruwalla, an orthopedic surgeon who lives in Toronto, back to India, where he was born.

Book Reporter

A nationwide
search for the killer takes the reader on a spellbinding tour of
India with encounters between street urchins, whores, child
stealers and drug sellers.Probably the most ambitious of Irving's
books --- because of the intricate plotting, the added element of
the murder mystery and the ...

The Satirist

The very fact that I speak of reading "A John Irving work," rather than speak of reading "one of John Irvings works" or "reading Irving" betrays that the works follow a patternindeed, an almost cinematic pattern, as if I had just seen "a John Irving production."